Knowing God

by J.I. Packer

When you start reading Luther, or Edwards, or Whitefield, though your doctrine may be theirs, you soon find yourself wondering whether you have any acquaintance at all with the mighty God whom they knew so intimately.

the Bible never lets us lose sight of his majesty and his unlimited dominion over all his creatures.

a living Person, thinking, feeling, active, approving of good, disapproving of evil, interested in his creatures all the time.

all history is under his sway.

Living becomes an awesome business when you realize that you spend every moment of your life in the sight and company of an omniscient, omnipresent Creator.

God speaks to people whose mood is the mood of many Christians today-despondent people, cowed people, secretly despairing people; people against whom the tide of events has been running for a very long time,

people who have ceased to believe that the cause of Christ can ever prosper again.

Behold your God!

Behold your God!

Behold your God!

Clinton and Saddam Hussein.

ehat did first edition say ?

Behold your God!

Behold your God!

If you have been resigning yourself to the thought that God has left you high and dry, seek grace to be ashamed of yourself. Such unbelieving pessimism deeply dishonors our great God and Savior.

How slow we are to believe in God as God, sovereign, all-seeing and almighty! How little we make of the majesty of our Lord and Savior Christ! The need for us is to “wait upon the LORD” in meditations on his majesty, till we find our strength renewed through the writing of these things upon our hearts.

Wisdom is the power to see, and the inclination to choose, the best and highest goal, together with the surest means of attaining it.

He alone is naturally and entirely and invariably wise.

Omniscience governing omnipotence, infinite power ruled by infinite wisdom, is a basic biblical description of the divine character.

in God boundless wisdom and endless power are united, and this makes him utterly worthy of our fullest trust.

When he made us, his purpose was that we should love and honor him, praising him for the wonderfully ordered complexity and variety of his world, using it according to his will, and so enjoying both it and him.

set upon them from all eternity,

transformation of the whole created order.

His immediate objectives are to draw individual men and women into a relationship of faith, hope, and love toward himself, delivering them from sin and showing forth in their lives the power of his grace; to defend his people against the forces of evil; and to spread throughout the world the gospel by means of which he saves.

God has set him forth

must

must

obeying him even when he commands something odd and unconventional. From being a man of the world, Abraham becomes

The consequences of Jacob’s cleverness were themselves God’s curse upon it.

And now God’s time had come. That night, as Jacob stood alone by the river Jabbok, God met him (32:24-30). There were hours of desperate, agonized conflict—spiritual and, as it seemed to Jacob, physical also. Jacob had hold of God; he wanted a blessing, an assurance of divine favor and protection in this crisis, but he could not get what he sought. Instead, he grew ever more

conscious of his own state—utterly helpless and, without God, utterly hopeless. He felt the full bitterness of his unscrupulous, cynical ways, now coming home to roost. He had hitherto been self-reliant, believing himself to be more than a match for anything that might come, but now he felt his complete inability to handle things, and he knew with blinding, blazing certainty that never again dare he trust himself to look after himself and to carve out his destiny. Never again dare he try to live by his wits.

The nature of Jacob’s prevailing with God (32:28) was simply that he had held on to God while God weakened him and wrought in him the spirit of submission and self-distrust; that he had desired God’s blessing so much that he clung to God through all this painful humbling, till he came low enough for God to raise him up by speaking peace to him and assuring him that he need not fear about Esau any more.

Jacob never lapsed back into his old ways.

to remain cheerful and charitable in frustrating circumstances,

complacency, or unreality, or undetected forms of pride and conceit. Perhaps his purpose is simply to draw us closer to

Samuel Rutherford!)

be prepared for the service of others by painful experiences which are quite undeserved.

First, by taking them as from God, and asking ourselves what reactions to them, and in them, the gospel of God requires of us, second, by seeking God’s face specifically about them.

tempting him to hard thoughts of God.

They will have been sent us to make and keep us humble, and to give us a new opportunity of showing forth the power of Christ in our mortal lives.

accepted it as wisely appointed

God made man a free spiritual being, a responsible moral agent with powers of choice and action, able to commune with him and respond to him, and by nature good, truthful, holy, upright (Eccles 7:29): in a word, godly.

distrusting our own thoughts and willing to have our minds turned upside down, can divine wisdom become ours.

We must learn to receive God’s word. Wisdom is divinely wrought in those, and those only, who apply themselves to God’s revelation. “Your commands make me wiser than my enemies,” declares the psalmist; “I have more insight than all my teachers”—why?—“for I meditate on your statutes” (Ps 119:98-99).

By soaking ourselves in the Scriptures,

To live wisely, you have to be clear-sighted and realistic—ruthlessly so—in looking at life as it is. Wisdom will not go with comforting illusions, false sentiment, or the use of rose-colored glasses.

This deep-seated, sin-bred unrealism is one reason why there is so little wisdom among us—even the soundest and most orthodox of us.

What the preacher wants to show him is that the real basis of wisdom is a frank acknowledgment that this world’s course is enigmatic, that much of what happens is quite inexplicable to us, and that most occurrences “under the sun” bear no outward sign of a rational, moral God ordering them at all.

The harder you try to understand the divine purpose in the ordinary providential course of events, the more obsessed and oppressed you grow with the apparent aimlessness of everything, and the more you are tempted to conclude that life really is as pointless as it looks.

The God who rules it hides himself.

we feel that God has slighted us;